


Better Left Unsolved

by chiiyo86



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, Loyalty, POV Multiple, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:47:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25574554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Ciel Phantomhive and his dark butler are figures shrouded in mystery. The other servants of the Phantomhive household hold various pieces of the mystery.
Relationships: Baldroy & Finnian & Mey-Rin & Sebastian Michaelis & Ciel Phantomhive & Snake & Tanaka
Comments: 4
Kudos: 62
Collections: Parallels Fanworks Exchange 2020





	Better Left Unsolved

**Author's Note:**

> Having to write this fic motivated me to catch up with the last chapters of the manga! It was fun trying to find the right tone for each of the servants' pov (especially Snake's!) and I hope you'll enjoy the end result. :)

Everything in the outside was wide and big and dazzling. Or at least, it was so at the Phantomhive manor. Finnian could never get enough of the vast gardens, of the tall trees, of the smaller plants, shyly pushing out of the ground, of the little chirping birds that Finnian could get to eat in his hand if he was being very, very gentle so as not to frighten them. Even inside, all of the rooms were big, a lot bigger than the basement where Finnian had spent his whole life with his siblings. 

Life was so different from before that sometimes Finnian felt as if he were dreaming. He had the right to spend as much time outside as he wanted. He had a name now, _Finnian_ , which he sometimes repeated quietly to himself, just to enjoy its music, and which was shortened as ‘Finny’ by Mister Sebastian and the young master, like a secret, special version of it. Mister Sebastian was very nice to him; he never yelled, never locked Finnian up or did experiments on him. The young master was seen more rarely, as Finnian tended to break a lot of things when he wasn’t careful. The young master was the most important person in the world and Finnian couldn’t risk hurting him. 

Finnian still got lost sometimes in the vast manor, and one day as he wandered from room to room, trying to find his way, he ended up in the sunroom. He’d been there a few times before, but it didn’t keep him from marvelling at the place. It was like another garden, but _inside_. The walls were made of glass, making them more windows than walls, with nothing of the opaque quality that normal walls had, letting the sunlight flow in. As the gardener, it would one day be Finnian’s responsibility to take care of the plants in the sunroom, but Sebastian had explained that they were more delicate than the plants outside and Finnian would need to be a better gardener before he was allowed to tend to them. It was always hot in the sunroom; the flowers were big, their colours vivid, the leaves so green they didn’t look real. Finnian walked with his nose up in the air, devouring all the plants with his eyes. A plant-less space opened up, revealing a round table at which the young master sat, sleeping on his crossed arms. An empty cup of tea was set in front of him, with a small plate that held nothing but a few cake crumbs and an abandoned silver spoon. 

Finnian approached timidly, unsure he was allowed to be here. The young master shook his head and muttered something indistinct. His shoulders were very tense, his arms shaking.

“Young master?” Finnian called, stepping closer.

The young master mumbled again, and Finnian bent over to listen to what he was saying. Despite having been at the manor for a few months, Finnian sometimes didn’t understand everything that the master said in his foreign tongue, so he wasn’t sure he was hearing him right. “Ciel,” the young master murmured, “no, please. Ciel, Ciel.”

Finnian leaned back, puzzled. ‘Ciel’ was the young master’s name, wasn’t it? Why was the young master calling his own name? At that moment, the young master jerked awake, almost falling off his chair.

“Young master!” Finnian exclaimed, catching him before he crashed on the floor. 

The young master struggled out of his grip, blinking furiously. He wiped the corner of his mouth and glanced furtively at Finnian. “What are you doing here?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“I was lost,” Finnian explained in the awkward English tongue. “I saw the plants. You talked in your dream.”

“What—what did I say?”

What the young master had said was incomprehensible and Finnian didn’t have the words, or feel like he had the right, to ask for an explanation. “I didn’t understand,” he said, which wasn’t a lie. “Do you want… Mister Sebastian?”

“No,” the young master said, smoothing the wrinkles on the tablecloth where he’d been sleeping. “There’s no need. I was just having a nap. Thank you, Finny. You can go now.”

Finnian hesitated, because he could see the young master’s hands shaking; but he was only the gardener and he broke too many things. He didn’t know how to help the young master, so he left shamefully. 

—-

The novelty of being able to see things close to her had yet to wear off. Like her hands—Mey-Rin couldn’t remember when she had last been capable of seeing her own hands as something other than blurry lumps. With her new eyes, she should have become less clumsy, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. She kept misjudging distances, losing her balance, tripping on the rugs. Everything in the manor was expensive, so every time she broke a teacup, a vase, a statue, she found herself covered in cold sweat, wondering if this was the one blunder that would make the young master fire her. It was a complete mystery, even to her, why her hands were the surest in the world when she held a rifle, but not when she did anything else.

No matter what she broke, the young master didn’t fire her. Life at the manor was like inhabiting another world where normal rules didn’t apply. It wasn’t normal for a manor so vast to have only one occupant and three servants, two of which were barely competent. It wasn’t normal for their master to be a child half her age wearing an eyepatch, who acted more haughtily than a prince and did secret jobs for the queen herself—and it wasn’t normal for the butler to be managing the whole household more or less by himself.

If her young master was a mystery, then Mister Sebastian was a bigger one. No matter what mishap Mey-Rin was responsible for, Mister Sebastian did nothing but sigh and give her an annoyed lecture, before he proceeded to fix everything. When Mey-Rin broke an entire tea set that the young master was supposed to use for afternoon tea with a duke that same afternoon, Mister Sebastian had repaired it by 4 o’clock and no break lines were visible to the naked eye. Sometimes, Mister Sebastian was so efficient that it looked like magic. 

“When you’re finished with this, I want you to clean the grates on the second floor’s rooms.”

Mister Sebastian’s voice jerked Mey-Rin out of her reverie. Not a good thing, because she was in the process of dusting the crystal chandelier in the dining room. She lost her balance, took a step back to recover it, too close to the edge, and felt the stool she was standing on start to topple. Her reflex was too grab one of the glittering crystals from the chandelier to keep herself from falling, but then she thought that it would be one more thing damaged by her, one more accident to try the young master’s patience and one more reason to get her fired—so she released the crystal and let herself fall. 

For a moment, she felt as though she were airborne. At the corner of her eye, from under the glasses, she could see a dark spot rushing at her, like a looming dark cloud pushed by the wind. Instead of the hard floor kicking the breath out of her, she felt two strong arms catching her. As she blinked, she saw Mister Sebastian’s handsome face peering down at her.

“Are you all right?” he asked in his suave voice.

Mey-Rin felt herself flush to the roots of her hair. “Ah, y-yes, yes,” she stammered, “I’m all right, I am.”

“Excellent,” Mister Sebastian said, dropping Mey-Rin on her behind, though fortunately from a far less great height than she would have fallen. “I’ll take care of the chandelier. You go clean the grates as I told you.”

“Right away, Mister Sebastian!” Mey-Rin exclaimed, jumping back on her feet.

As she hurried out of the dining room, Mey-Rin thought again about the incident. She was almost sure that Mister Sebastian had been on the other side of the room right before she fell. The dining room was very large. It was similar to the day Mister Sebastian had caught her, when she’d attempted to kill the young master and he’d dashed at her with such speed that he hadn’t seemed human. But this was a stupid idea, wasn’t it? What could he be, if not human? Although… she was almost certain that on the day Mister Sebastian had captured her, and today too, she’d seen his eyes gleam red. 

Mey-Rin shook her head, trying to dislodge her silly thoughts. It must have been her mind playing tricks on her, both times. She shouldn’t be trying to find fault with Mister Sebastian, anyway. It was thanks to him and the young master that she ate good food every day, slept in a bed, wasn’t hit by anyone, and had a purpose that didn’t make her feel like dirt. Those were gifts that she shouldn’t question. Mister Sebastian’s mystery would have to remain inscrutable. 

—-

Couldn’t be all that complicated. This was Baldroy’s approach to most things and the approach he’d chosen when told he would become a cook for the Phantomhive family. It wasn’t that he’d never cooked before, exactly—he could fix himself some eggs, could toast bread, could prepare coffee—but even he knew that this wasn’t the level of what would be expected from the kitchens of a fancy English manor. Still, Baldroy didn’t want to sweat it. Mix some ingredients together, throw some oil in a pan, shove something in the oven—with some trial and error, there were no reasons he shouldn’t manage to make something edible. He would improve eventually. And if he didn’t, well; Baldroy was no fool, and he knew that cooking meals wasn’t really what he’d been hired for. It wasn’t on him that the young master’s meals depended, but on Sebastian, who was the real master at _cuisine_. Baldroy was mostly here to make things blow up and that was fine with him. 

It was a sweet deal, being hired at the Phantomhive manor. He’d gotten good comrades out of it. Finny was a nice kid, though scarily strong and a little too enthusiastic, and Mey-Rin was kind of bubbly in everyday life but reliable in a fight. The master was a bit of a brat, but one that Baldroy owed his new life to, so he couldn’t complain. He felt bad for the kid, although of course he would never say it out loud, the little master’s pride being the ticklish kind. Ten was a young age to lose your parents and to face horror; what sort of horror exactly was unspecified, but Baldroy had seen enough haunted people in his life to know how to spot them. It was hard to see on an adult, and even harder to see it on a kid who should have led a privileged life. Wasn’t Baldroy’s place to comment on it, though.

As for Sebastian… The man was one of a kind, that was for sure. Take the day Baldroy had set the kitchen on fire, for example. Well, one of the days when he’d set the kitchen on fire. Turns out that it wasn’t prudent to smoke and cook with oil at the same time. When a few specks of burning ashes had dropped from Baldroy’s cigarette, flames had burst out of the frying pan he was handling, singeing his eyebrows. And since some of the oil had dripped on the stove when he’d poured it, other things had started burning too. All in all, it had gotten out of control rather quickly. Fortunately, Sebastian had swept in before the fire could morph into an inferno. Baldroy had seen him reach _through_ the flames for Baldroy’s collar, pulling him out of the kitchen. Sebastian had doused the fire with a hose, standing in the middle of the kitchen as flames licked his face. He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t made a sound, and afterward his skin had looked as smooth as a baby’s butt.

 _Holy hell,_ had been Baldroy’s thought. He’d examined that first thought with a second thought, wondering if _‘hell’_ wasn’t precisely the keyword here. _I’ll be damned. Maybe I already am._

But if there was a God, then Baldroy sure as hell had never seen Him on the battlefield and didn’t think he owed Him any damned thing. 

“Thank you,” he’d said to Sebastian, sheepishly rubbing the back of his head. “Must admit that got a little out of hand.”

“Please be more careful when handling inflammable liquids in the future,” the butler had replied primly. Not even one hair on his head was burned. “We can’t be rebuilding the kitchen every other day.”

“Sure thing. I’ll be careful.”

“It is the young master’s enemies that you should try to burn, not the residents of this manor.”

“’Course.”

Baldroy was nothing if not adaptable. If this new job would lead him to hell, then he didn’t mind too much. After all, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen hell already. 

—-

The manor was a great playground for the snakes. They slithered up the narrow service staircases and corridors, wound their way in the chimneys, slipped through the gaps of doors left ajar. Past the first surprise, the other servants were rather accepting of them. Finny was the friendliest, calling them ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ and cooing at them in an incomprehensible tongue. Mey-Rin remained fearful the longest, but the snakes, especially Emily, managed to progressively make her warm up to them, until she started sneaking them tiny bits of food. Baldroy continued to grumble that they got everywhere and were always underfoot, but he never tried to hurt them and eventually started feeding them too. Tanaka tolerated them but didn’t try to interact with them.

The snakes went everywhere, saw everything that went on in the manor and then reported it to him. Here was Black giving Smile his bath; here was Mey-Rin dusting the furniture in the formal parlour; there was Finny raking up dead leaves in the garden; there was Baldroy baking something in the oven; there was Tanaka drinking tea in his room.

“I think it was warm bread that Baldroy was making,” said Emily.

“It’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t burn it,” said Oscar.

“Don’t be so mean,” said Emily. “He does his best.”

“His best looks like a lot of charcoal.”

Whether Baldroy had been trying to make bread or not, it did end up getting too burned to be easily identified. He had to open the kitchen’s window to let the smoke out. Black was wrapping Smile into a large towel to get him dry. Mey-Rin had dented a Welsh dresser and was fretting over what to do.

“Black will fix it,” said Wordsworth. “He can fix everything.”

“He is rather marvellously gifted,” said Webster. 

“He works so fast,” piped up Donne. “Sometimes you can’t even see his hands move.”

“Don’t you think that’s strange?” asked Oscar.

The other snakes shushed him up. Black might be a little out of ordinary, but weren’t they all? The Phantomhive manor was the only place out of the circus where they hadn’t been mocked and shunned for it. Outside, Finny was crying because he’d plucked out a burgeoning flower that he’d mistaken for weed. 

“He’s a idiot,” said Oscar.

“Oscar!” cried out Emily. “Don’t say such things. He’s the kindest to us. He’s a very gentle soul.”

Tanaka had gone out and was comforting Finny over the loss of the flower. The snakes agreed it was very nice of him; although he largely kept to himself, they had to acknowledge that he’d never been anything but cordial to them. Inside, Black was helping Smile get dressed.

“Did you see that Smile has some sort of mark on his back?” asked Keats. “It looks like a brand. How do you suppose he got it?”

“It’s not something we should be wondering about,” said Webster. “If he has painful things in his past, then he has a right to keep it a secret.”

“And what about his eye?” insisted Keats. “Have you seen the mark on his eye? What could have done this?”

“Keats,” fussed Emily. “Stop being so nosy. Smile has welcomed us to the household even after we’d tried to kill him.”

“But are we sure that the only secret he has is a painful past?”

Keats’ question made all the snakes writhe uneasily and he had to pet them one by one to calm them down. Smile had told them that their circus friends had evaded the authorities, that he was still looking for them, that staying with him was the best chance that they had to see their friends again. They’d decided to trust him and their lives had hugely improved from it. Still, there had been no news from their friends since then.

“Smile has just said to Black, ‘I have yet to reach my goal. My soul is still mine,’” said Goethe. “What could this mean?”

The snakes started to argue with each other over what Smile’s meaning could be and whether it was appropriate for them to try and guess it. He had to shush them when the fight became too rowdy. He also forbade them to sneak into Smile’s private chambers from then on. Everyone in the household tolerated the snakes, but maybe they wouldn’t if they realized how intrusive the snakes were being. Some doors would just have to remain closed.

—-

The manor used to be bustling with activity from the hundreds of servants who worked in it. Sometimes, when Tanaka wandered around, he could still see the scenes from the manor’s life that had been preserved in his memory: the maids walking up and down the corridors, the master receiving his friends in the parlour, the mistress strolling in the gardens under the shade of her parasol, and the twins running after each other in the staircases, trailed by the horrified cries from the servants who worried that they would break their necks. All of those memories were only a few years old, but they felt like phantoms from centuries past, living only in Tanaka’s and the young master’s memories.

Tanaka was walking in the corridors right now, holding a candle in his hand, its flickering light making shadows dance on the walls. The shadows stalked him like creeping monsters. The daily routine of the manor wasn’t the only thing that came to his mind when he walked across the house. Terrible, bloody images hid in the recesses of his mind, maids with gore spread over their uniforms, footmen staring at the ceiling with open dead eyes. His lord and lady, wrapped in an embrace that death had fossilized. 

He had been approaching the young master’s chambers and saw Sebastian come out of it, gently closing the door behind him.

“Ah, Tanaka,” Sebastian said, his dark eyes examining Tanaka. “Having trouble sleeping?”

“Old men like me barely need sleep,” Tanaka said with a benign smile. “The weight of the years keeps us awake. Has the young master finally fallen asleep?”

“You heard him?”

“My hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but as I said, I don’t sleep so much anymore. I heard him cry out.”

Sebastian’s gaze was piercing. Much was going on behind those eyes. Tanaka could still remember the day the young master had come back, miraculously alive, with an unknown man in a black livery who bore a startling resemblance with the late Earl Phantomhive.

“You should go to bed,” Sebastian said at last. “It’s getting very late. The young master cares for you so much, he would want you to be mindful of your health.”

“Of course,” Tanaka said. “I’ll be going in a moment. I’m just finishing my tour of the manor. It comforts me to do it.”

“Good night, then,” Sebastian said.

“A good night to you.”

Tanaka didn’t ask the butler whether he was going to bed; he knew the man never slept. He watched him walk away, getting swallowed by the shadows, and then he went to the young master’s room and quietly slipped inside. He kept the light of his candle away from the bed, so as to not wake up the young master, and watched the sleeping child in it. In his slumber, the young master looked his age, stripped from the adult mask that he wore during daytime. His eyes twitched under his eyelids and his lips quivered, a moan escaping them. Tanaka stepped further away, making his presence unobtrusive.

“Ciel,” the young master murmured. “Wait for me.”

Tanaka sighed, sadness overwhelming him. Of course the young master would miss his brother, and it wasn’t something that he could express during his waking hours. This was another common point between Tanaka and the young master: only the two of them knew that Ciel Phantomhive was someone to be mourned. 

“Sleep well, young master,” Tanaka whispered before stepping out of the room, leaving the young master to his dreams of the past.


End file.
